25 Mar Phases of the Moon in Oreo Cookies

We have been reading Harold and the Purple Crayon as part of our Five in a Row curriculum.  In this book, Harold goes on an adventure in the middle of the night with his purple crayon, drawing whatever and wherever his imagination leads.  In the very beginning, he realized he needed light and so he drew a moon to light his way.

As part of the science component, we decided to learn a little bit about the moon.  When I told this to Clark, he scoffed at me, saying: “What?!  Why would we learn about the moon?!  All it does is give off light!”  Clearly, we can benefit from some education!    From what I can tell, this subject is taught in several different grades, so my goal with this initial exposure was to simply spark some interest and hopefully learn a little in the process.

We began by watching a few videos to introduce some introductory concepts.

I don’t know who comes up with using Oreo Cookies to help teach the concept of moon phases, but it’s seriously brilliant.  If there is one way to capture Clark and Luci’s interest, it is to say “SNACK!”  I found a worksheet to guide us HERE.

Can you tell we were a little excited?  It’s not every day that I allow Oreos in the house.

Making Moons out of Oreo Cookies

We first had to figure out how to break the Oreos apart without breaking the cookie or the filling.

Once we figured that out, I had to figure out how to get our project done without these two little vultures eating all of the Oreos!

We managed to complete it.  We may have even learned a few things – mostly about Oreos, I’d guess.  The next time we address this subject, I think we will do something a little more concrete and maybe monitor the moon to observe the actual changes.  In the meantime, we learned the names of the different moon shapes and a few new things about the moon.

(It didn’t occur to me at the time, but it would have been a lot smarter to put the paper in a plastic sleeve first.)

For more inspiration on how to learn about the Solar System, be sure to check out How to Learn About the Solar System in 50 Awesome Ways!